Amiga HW price in a perspective

[persia]

All of which has nothing to do with the price of tea in China.  You have to compare apples to apples.  US$1000 will buy you a lot of computer, multiple cores, gigahertz speeds, etc.  Sam's specs compared to what you could buy in an AMD or Intel system are a joke.  SAMs specs for a thousand US dollars look good in 1999, not 2009.

It's sort of like saying well yeah people should be able to afford a fifty US dollar cup of coffee when Starbucks is selling them for a fiver.  Add that to the fact that in Starbucks you can have your choice of flavours and additives whilst in your store you can only have rancid yak butter, and if your coffee cup has a hole in it be grateful there's a cup and we didn't pour it in your hand.

[persia]

The point being that you have underpowered over priced hardware compared with the rest of the World and in return you choice of software is extremely limited and the OS lacks basic things like memory protection.  

SO in the end you pay much more and get much less in return.  On a simple dollar based performance comparison with other computers on the market (MS Windows, Mac OS, Linux,BSD, Haiku, etc) the Sam board quite frankly stinks.  

Of course the Amiga market is not the general public, it's a small group of collectors, so the dollar performace ratios don't matter as much, if at all.  Indeed, a high price for low performance hardware is an excellent gatekeeper to keep the hoy polloy out. Nobody is going to buy a SAM board based on a rational decision, thereby making the price the perfect way to restrict membership in the club.

It also helps to rationalise why nobody from the general public are buying them.  A market priced Amiga not selling would leave only one explanation, there's no hidden millions of people out there waiting for it.  That would shatter the hopes and dreams of many Amigans.  Better to keep the price up and maintain the myth.

[persia]

And this is a different time.  The first time Amiga came out it was cutting edge hardware pushed beyond all sane limits.  That was then, today it's rather ordinary trailing edge technology that is handled gently by the OS to get speed.  It has some concessions to modernity but it basically retro in flavour.  

On the cutting edge the Amiga survived for a few years and then the Apple and Microsoft engineers came out and ended that.  There is no way to stay at the cutting edge without massive commitment of money and time.  On the retro end however this is not critical, you don't have to outpace or even keep pace with the market, in fact the market is irrelevant!

The closest thing I can think of is steam punk, you've got the past re-imagined into the present.  Not everyone's cup of tea, but if it's enough to pay the bills then it's ok.

[persia]

If AmigaOS ran on X86 you'd get more people trying it for sure.  You wouldn't have to run out and buy special hardware just to try the OS.  You could even run it in a VirtualBox/VMWare/Parallels window.  €1000 just to try, on a 1999 spec computer that can't run any other OS!

[persia]

Ah, but a Mercedes will get you comfortable cruising speeds well in excess of 200 Km/hr, you get what you pay for in a Mercedes.  A Sam board is more a Trabant at a Mercedes price...

Well, you can get a Lada or you can get Mercedes... both doing the same work, but in one you are feeling home... in the other not. But that is a personal decision.

[persia]

Yeah, I love the lampshade ones.  You can paint the bottom part in a red/white chequered pattern and call it a boing ball!

eMacs aren't really all that much better than MacMinis, they're pretty close.  The lack of 50lbs of CRT makes the Mini a better choice IMO, and I have a few eMacs and Minis here.

The eMacs definitely are cheaper when you can find them, though.

edit: have to say, though, my favorites are the G4 iMacs.  LCD on a stick in a gumdrop.